Why Medicine Really Needs Big Data, Not Old Data

On Monday, it sounded like the American Heart Association had taken IT advice from the Obama administration. The New York Times reported that a top cardiologist said an online calculator central to new guidelines that tell doctors when to prescribe cholesterol medicine is over-estimating people’s risk of heart attacks and strokes – thereby putting more patients on statin drugs, the now-generic medicines that were once the best-sellers for Pfizer and Merck.